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St
Andrew, North Burlingham

This
church will be a familiar landmark to anyone who
has made the journey by car from Norwich to
Yarmouth. Although the village of North
Burlingham is now thankfully bypassed, the great
tower of St Andrew still lifts its head above the
trees on a rise to the north of the road. Pevsner
was careful enough to notice a Norman hood mould
reset above the south porch entrance, but really
this building is the work of the late medieval
period. Will evidence places the tower as being
under construction throughout the 1460s, and this
is probably the date of the great Perpendicular
windows that flank the nave. The body of the nave
and chancel are probably a bit earlier, but not
much. St Andrew is a great statement of the
wealth of East Anglia towards the end of the
middle ages, and the dramatic view of it from the
main Norwich to Yarmouth road was fully intended
from the start.

There were once three
Burlingham parishes. As well as St Edmund away in
South Burlingham, there was another North
Burlingham church, St Peter, a hundred
yards away towards Yarmouth. It is now a ruin,
and St Andrew, the larger of the two, has
survived as the village church.

For a
church with such a grand aspect, the graveyard is
surprisingly tight on the south side, and the restored
flintwork is perhaps a little overneat. As with Blofield,
a couple of miles off, this church has an urban feel. It
would be quite at home in a town, and the sense of this
inside is accentuated by the busy way the pews crowd
together. You feel that this is not a quiet backwater,
but a church where there is life.

However,
as enthusiastic as the Victorians no doubt were at North
Burlingham, there are many survivals of older times, and
the greatest of these is the last medieval roodscreen in
East Anglia, and one of the last in England. It is dated
1536, by which date it must already have seemed a defiant
statement. As if in response, the faces of the Saints
have been excised more violently than any others in East
Anglia, by the cruel, puritan hands of Edward VI's
Taleban. They must have been beautiful once. They depict,
from the north, St Withburga holding a church and with
deer at her feet and St Benedict with devils at his feet,
(it is worth recalling that these two represented Holy
Orders a year or so before the cruel dissolution of the
monasteries), St Edward the Confessor, St Thomas of
Canterbury (most viciously excised of all, he championed
European Catholicism against the crown), St John the
Baptist, St Cecilia, St Walstan (Norfolk's worker saint,
again thoroughly disapproved of by the Anglican
reformers), St Catherine, and St Etheldreda. There is an
unidentified male figure between St Catherine and St
Etheldreda.

There is
another fine medieval screen set into the tower arch, but
it did not actually come from this church at all. Along
with several of the memorials, and a couple of late
medieval brasses, it came from the ruined church of St Peter up the road. There
are beautiful medallion faces, and the angels carry
shields with the keys of St Peter in them. You can't help
thinking that it would have been rather imposing in its
original church.

One of the delights of
making this journey around Norfolk is bumping
into people who are users of the site. That was
the case here, a mother and her son who are
typical of thousands of ordinary people who get
on with the work of safeguarding our heritage. It
seems a small miracle to me that there are so
many people who will still go out of their way to
quietly carry out the herculean task of keeping
our medieval churches in business, despite the
disinterest, hostility and shameful lack of
support that come from central government and
seem increasingly enshrined in national culture
and our hysterical media. And they do this for no
reward.

These
buildings are much more than mere venues for
religious services and marriages. They are our
national folk museum, our island story, the
touchstones down the long generations to where we
came from, the hearts of communities that have
survived, if only in name, since long before the
Normans arrived and got us all organised. As we
witness the tortuous death throes of the Church
of England, they remind us that these buildings
are bigger and older than the Anglicanism to
which they now play host, and and if they are to
survive beyond our time it will be because of
these wonderful custodians. Every time I enter
one of these buildings and meet people like this,
I am truly humbled.